Things That Are Bothering Me: Part One

  Notes to the reader:

• What you are about to read is quite resentful in its tone. Please don't read further if you do not want to go through the unpleasant experience. Also contains graphic descriptions of mild bodily harm and intense psychological damage.
• Thanks for dropping by this sleepy blog of mine (deserted bog, more like (there's going to be a lot of parentheses (too lazy to add footnotes))). Feel free to spread the word. Commenting is also welcome.
• I'm out of work for more than a year now. If you could help me find a means of sustenance, that would be great. I'm good in visual design and have got some experience too. I've got a family to feed and having a head in the clouds doesn't seem to help much.
• The language is not perfect. I am not as articulate as I would like to be. One may find a lot of misplaced definite-articles, non-native sentence structures, and unconventional punctuation.
• This post (one of the most popular so far) is being continuously improved (that is what I would like to call those obsessive nitpicking edits I make waking up during midnight) and who knows, you may encounter a totally different beast (*wink*) after a few hours. Enjoy.

In part one of this series, I'm trying to put down what it feels like to be on the receiving end of corporal punishment in the public school system in Kerala and its aftermath in adult life. I belong to the batch that completed its twelfth year of schooling in the year 2007. A lot of trauma and permanent damage were caused in these exchanges, which were meant to "correct" me and help me lead a healthy life. I assure you, none of that worked. Worse, it broke me in every sense. These have also contributed tremendously to the recalcitrant and self-destructive behaviour that I am still fighting to contain.

Standard V: I forgot the Maths notebook at home, or at least that was what I thought. I was sent home from the school, for the first time in my life, to fetch it. I thought the punishment would end in this humiliation. I couldn't find the darned thing in my home either. I went back empty handed. I searched my bag again and there it was! I was hit hard on my back, for the first time by any man inside or outside my extended family. The first violation I can remember (I'm trying to look away from the relative positions of the two individuals involved in the feudal and caste hierarchies. Let's attempt to open one can of worms at a time, shall we?). My father never punished me in any manner, to this day. But the Maths teacher did, and asked, "why are you pretending to be such an idiot?" I cried.

Standard VIII: I helped one of my classmates to draw a picture of a soldier as part of a home-work in English. It was a stand-in teacher, whose actual subject was Geography, who was teaching us the subject at that time (some of us were of the opinion that he had a funny accent (not me, I was too terrified to notice.) with a strong MTI. Looking back now, nearly all of them had, even the ones who were evangelical about better English. One of them came up with a heavy-handed and crude scheme to turn all of us into instant translating machines. Boy, didn't we know we were being used as Guinea pigs all along? That is a story for a later part, not this one). He found out the similarity in styles and questioned me. I admitted that I had helped to outline the picture. He slapped me. Right on my cheek. No-one did that to me ever before or ever since. And asked "will you give outlines again?" I cried incessantly, uncontrollably. Although slightly taken aback by my reaction (that doesn't usually happen to an omniscient being like him, which only shows the scale of impact he didn't think he could cause), he made a remark to the class, "this is a sensitive boy. This is how you use the word 'sensitive', you see?" He was an absolute tyrannical dictator and had developed a club of students with desirable qualities, or those who he thought would 'achieve greatness in life' (read 'get into bureaucratic jobs'), which I was obviously not worthy to enter, and made aware of it every time. After all these years, if he turns his head and casually looks in my general direction (God forbid), all my courage would drain instantly. He was the State (not the administrative and geographical unit, but the one that Plato wrote about. This one is likely to be a Spartan specimen, from what I can tell.) personified.

The next two incidents are not corporal, but extensions in time of what happened in the last one. These will help form a bigger picture and shows the stubborn nature of the perpetrator that lacks any regret, introspection, or willingness to acknowledge what had happened.

When we were in ninth, the guy got promoted to the department of higher secondary education in a different school and I was the most joyous person to listen to the news ("I hear that teachers who will not slap you are going to teach you after I leave. Good luck", he said). Years passed without fear of anticipating his petrifying gaze around the next corner of the derelict labyrinth that was the high-school complex. But one day, to my bone-chilling horror, after three years, he came back to the school to invigilate our twelfth board English exam (invigilators for board exams usually come from other schools). My room was at the end of a corridor on first floor and I recognised his shadow the moment it appeared at the other end, walking towards me. With my heart beating ten times faster for each door that he didn't take along the longest corridor that I had ever stood in, I was slowly becoming aware of the impending doom. And it did strike neat and clean. Both of us were in the same room again. The exam began. I was glued to the paper with the added weight of two bespectacled orbs watching over my shoulder every twist and turn of the curves that the ball of my pen was manoeuvring in. As the longest seconds ticked by, I began to regain hope that I would escape this ordeal unscathed. No. Being the ignorant peasant that I was, in an answer to a question to write a letter to a newspaper, I chose a vernacular daily. His all-seeing eyes (like I said before, he sees everything, knows everything, past, present and future. I'm not kidding. He must have even foreseen this article I'm writing.) detected the mild error of my judgement and commented on it in the most unhelpful way. You should note that I am the first person, in my family of four, to have ever appeared for a twelfth-standard board exam. I was shaken and it must have shown on paper, for when the results came, I got an A-Plus in all subjects except English. Not that any of those grades meant anything in the long run (by 'long run' I mean a few months).

 

The targeted emotional bullying continued till I was in college (it didn't continue after the college simply because I ran away from the place) with the same extreme prejudice. My academic excellence carried on to the college years, though with much greater effort. One day I was returning from college, and this guy was in the same bus-stop that I had to go. He asked me, smirkingly, quite joyously, "how many supplees have you got?" (The word 'supplee' is one of the most dreaded in engineering colleges, at least by some. Slang for 'supplementary exam', the one you take after you fail the first attempt. I had none and passed with honours. Again, not that it mattered much). That is not the first question a caring and a compassionate teacher would ask when he meets one of his previous students doing higher studies. I was desperately trying to build a career, man. There would be no breadwinner in the family other than a low-grade pensioner (my father, retired a year before the first incident, is unaware of any of it, and probably thinks he sent his son to the best schools out there) if I fail. And there isn't any in the family other than him. Happy now?

Standard IX: caned for not answering who threw the duster out of the window, in a tuition centre, by a teacher with a thick moustache who always wore a serious expression, just like the Soviet dictator. The feeling of injustice in being wrongly punished was profound. I cried.

Before closing this, I should tell the story of the classmate who took a hit for me quite unexpectedly and unwillingly while I was attempting to dodge one. Standard X: Physics classroom. Morning hours. The teacher was checking our notebooks. I had forgotten mine (again!). When she asked, I said I had lent it to one of my classmates (who happened to be our class monitor). I said his name because he was not in the classroom and I thought he would be absent for the rest of the day and no-one would be punished. But, as if in a nightmare, as if on cue, the classmate walked into the room with a smile on his face and a spring in his step. Slap. I watched his smile turn into confusion first and sadness later. I don't think he understood my role in the whole episode. He even must have thought the notebook was with him and it was him who forgot it. Relationship between us hasn't been easy after that. I was too ashamed to apologise.

For almost all of my school life, I was the brightest student in the entire school. If this was my experience, one can imagine the way people on the last bench was treated, for instance. The fundamental assumption was that you are a criminal in the making. Whatever horror the teacher chooses to unleash upon you is for your benefit because he is trying to steer you away from that terrible course of life which you were predestined to take. I don't know if that would be called a Calvinistic approach, but it is certainly not the best way to start educating a child.

Vivid memories of these events (this list doesn't include them all.) continue to wreak havoc in me everyday, every time I try to make a decision, every time I utter a word. I wish there was a way out.